Thursday, December 9, 2010

Website for Literary Teens...Congrats!

By Julie Bosman, New York Times, December 5, 2010Figment.com will be unveiled on Monday as an experiment in online literature, a free platform for young people to read and write fiction, both on their computers and on their cellphones. Users are invited to write novels, short stories and poems, collaborate with other writers and give and receive feedback on the work posted on the site. The idea for Figment emerged from a very 21st-century invention, the cellphone novel, which arrived in the United States around 2008. That December, Ms. Goodyear wrote a 6,000-word article for The New Yorker about young Japanese women who had been busy composing fiction on their mobile phones. In the article she declared it “the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age.” Figment is an attempt to import that idea to the United States and expand on it. Mr. Lewis, who was out of a job after Portfolio, the Condé Nast magazine, was shuttered last year, teamed up with Ms. Goodyear, and the two worked with schools, libraries and literary organizations across the country to recruit several hundred teenagers who were willing to participate in a prototype, which went online in a test version in June.
Here is one of the best ideas to have emerged about linking teens to their literary talents, aspirations and their literary peers from across the globe.
The acorncentreblog.com will keep watching to see the calibre of writing these bold and imaginative teens turn out, and will keep our readers posted.
Once again,congrats to the originators of this project!